A plurality of proposals have been made about a mechanism that attains high-speed processing by distributing a great deal of processing to a plurality of devices upon processing. For example, refer to IBM professional paper “Application of Grid Computing to Commercial Systems” http://www-6.ibm.com/jp/provision/no36/pdf/36_pprl.pdf for grid computing and the like.
In some cases, processing that requires huge amounts of time by fully utilizing a plurality of devices connected to a network and receiving a job from a client is executed. In such case, it is expected to implement higher-speed distributed processing by using the framework of grid computing to effectively utilize the processing capacities of a plurality of devices.
On the other hand, in recent years, the awareness of energy saving has heightened, and it is a common practice to automatically shift an unused device to a power-saving mode and to set it in a standby state. Such devices are connected via a network, and are controlled to process jobs requested from other devices. In such case, other devices request jobs regardless of the shift state to the power-saving mode and the consumption power of the job request destination device. As a result, the request destination device which will shift to the power-saving mode unless it receives job requests from other devices cannot shift to the power-saving mode, and loses chances to stand by in the power-saving mode. As a result, the energy saving effect is impaired.